


Iced (The Competitive Remix)

by Isis



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Community: remixthedrabble, Double Drabble, Gen, Hockey, Humor, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-10
Updated: 2008-04-10
Packaged: 2019-06-12 11:37:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15339039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isis/pseuds/Isis
Summary: Winter means ice hockey, even in Atlantis.





	Iced (The Competitive Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [untitled double drabble](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/398613) by Malnpudl. 



> This is a remix of the 12th ficlet on Malnpudl's page of "15 McShep Drabbles (Stargate Atlantis)", the one that begins **Rodney felt so cold**. In the original: “Each drabble had to use one sentence or phrase from any of the other drabbles in the tree. The sentence I used in each one is in bold” so I kept that line and boldfaced it in my remix as well.
> 
> Written for Remix the Drabble round 4.

Rodney burst in from the plaza. “Major! You’ve got to see this!” He grabbed John’s arm, but **Rodney felt so cold** that John shook him off immediately.

“Hold your horses, McKay. I thought we were having an ice storm.”

“ _Had_ ,” said Rodney triumphantly. “Now, we have an ice rink.”

“Oh,” said John. “Great.”

“Don’t you see what this means?”

“ _Disney on Ice_ is coming to Atlantis?”

Rodney rolled his eyes. “Think hockey.”

“Hockey,” said John thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t you need skates?”

“On it!” Rodney wagged his finger at him. “I’ve already manufactured blades. Just got to figure out how to fasten them to our boots.”

“Hockey sticks?”

“An Athosian woodcrafter’s making them.”

“I could swipe you a mess hall biscuit to use as a hockey puck.”

“Not a bad idea,” said Rodney. “But we’ve got that covered. Although now that you mention it, I was hoping you’d help.”

“Help, how?”

“You play, right?”

Warily, John nodded.

“Excellent! You are now captain of the military team. You’ll play my scientists.”

“A bunch of overweight lab jockeys against trained soldiers? We’ll clean your clocks, Rodney.”

“Which team has more Russians, Czechs and Canadians?” Rodney’s grin was pure evil. “First game’s in four days.”

**Author's Note:**

> (Original author's note copied from LJ)
> 
> Turning 200 words into 200 different words was an interesting challenge. I wanted to do a second story for Mal, and I wanted to do a different fandom. All her SGA stories came from a McShep drabble tree, so they were all tiny. Because there's special recognition for preserving the length of the story, I decided I wanted to try that.
> 
> And it wasn't easy. Unlike distilling a longer story into a drabble or double-drabble, a story that's already that length already tells the core story. What I ended up doing was taking the ficlet that I could see with a different punchline and writing it that way. So it's built around the core idea "a winter storm inspires Rodney to bring hockey to Atlantis," sharing a few dialogue elements, but taking it in a slightly different direction so I could use my punchline instead.
> 
> The other thing I want to say about this one is that as the original ficlet was written to use a line from a previous ficlet in the drabble tree, I felt it important to preserve that line. One of my favorite books is Douglas Hofstadter's _Le Ton Beau de Marot_ , in which he discusses translation of poetry, and the question of: what is important to preserve? The meter? The rhyme? The literal meaning? Before I read his book, I believed that the best translation was the most literal one, but now I understand translation much better, I think, and I agree that with e.g. poetry, structure may trump literal word meanings. So because the original ficlet was written around a specific line, my "translation" needed to also use that line.


End file.
